Deep down, the dude who gave me the Jell-O knees was an effigy, a mask over a faceless face that probably ten thousand years ago looked like a squid or something.

Rick Yancey -- The Infinite Sea

A man so despised, so foul tempered, so robotically inflexible that on the last day of eighth grade we defaced his yearbook picture with staples and left it like an effigy behind his seat.

Ransom Riggs -- Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Very slowly the shapes of things return, the trees standing like ancient effigies whispering of the world that once was in some alternate realm where only shadows reside.

Pittacus Lore -- I Am Number Four

I realized that it was the first time I had heard anyone made of flesh and blood (as opposed to some cinematic effigy) say "thirty" as a contraction for "thirty thousand."

William Styron -- Sophie’s Choice

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It has the worrying power of effigies, a lifeless life that fills me with creeping horror.

Margaret Atwood -- Cat’s Eye

And inside, the guy, an effigy crouched in ash on his own hearthstone, ready to fall into black dust at the next blast of cold wind to sweep through the shell of his home.

Diana Gabaldon -- Outlander

At first he was a silent effigy of sorrow; but then the lamentation rose out of him, loud and sustained as the conch.

William Golding -- Lord of the Flies

These are effigies.

Dan Brown -- The Da Vinci Code

He saw before him an officer delegated to enforce the law, and perfectly well knew that it would be as unavailing to seek pity from a magistrate decked with his official scarf, as to address a petition to some cold marble effigy.

Alexandre Dumas -- The Count of Monte Cristo

He had himself devoutly removed the imperial effigy from the cross which Napoleon had given him; this made a hole, and he would not put anything in its place.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

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He saw, the history says, the very countenance, the very face, the very look, the very physiognomy, the very effigy, the very image of the bachelor Samson Carrasco!

Miguel de Cervantes -- Don Quixote

You were hanged in effigy from the center red-light wire downtown on Main Street this morning.

John Howard Griffin -- Black Like Me

I have no doubt, for example, that the Fernworthy people will burn me in effigy to-night.

Arthur Conan Doyle -- The Hound of the Baskervilles

And as he reached the end of the passage, the memory of a third stone effigy came back to him: that of an ugly old warlock, onto whose head Harry himself had placed a wig and a battered old hat.

J.K. Rowling -- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Before I turn away I see her straighten her blue skirt, clench her legs together; she continues lying on the bed, gazing up at the canopy above her, stiff and straight as an effigy.

Margaret Atwood -- The Handmaid’s Tale

, issuing from a red and white rose, with the effigy of the new King’s mother, Jane Seymour, represented by his side.

Mark Twain -- The Prince and The Pauper

Shadowy effigies in armor stood on either side, a dead silence reigned, the lamp burned blue, and the ghostly figure ever and anon turned its face toward him, showing the glitter of awful eyes through its white veil.

Louisa May Alcott -- Little Women

A hideous straw-Stuffed effigy of myself, Tom Finley, was hung and set fire to in the main quadrangle of the college.

Tennessee Williams -- A Streetcar Named Desire

She believed Mama, yet her eyes kept going back to the tormented effigy.

The cricket cherished what avaricious secret: patiently sculptured what effigy of dread?

James Agee -- A Death in the Family

A procession—a scandal—an effigy of me, and him!

Thomas Hardy -- The Mayor of Casterbridge

What they dredged smoking out of the ground looked like some desiccated effigy from a tomb.

Cormac McCarthy -- All the Pretty Horses

So Hepzibah put forth her lank arm, and, taking the effigy from the shop-window, delivered it to her first customer.

Nathaniel Hawthorne -- The House of the Seven Gables

It was a cemetery of dead forms, of funereal effigy and stone angels.

Anne Rice -- Interview with the Vampire

He was lying so, on his back, his hands crossed on his breast like a tomb effigy, when he heard again feet on the cramped stairs.

William Faulkner -- Light in August

At Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill: rows and rows of you in your vaults, with your effigies under Purbeck-marble canopies.

Thomas Hardy -- Tess of the d’Urbervilles

His need for her and his vulnerability to her screamed at him to back off, to placate her while there was still time if indeed there still was , as a tribe in one of ,those Rider Haggard stories would have placated their goddess when she was angry, by making sacrifice to her effigy.

Stephen King -- Misery

The effigy of a young man was tied to the middle of the stem.

Joseph Campbell -- The Hero With a Thousand Faces

His idea was still with me, because it was not a vapour sunshine could disperse, nor a sand-traced effigy storms could wash away; it was a name graven on a tablet, fated to last as long as the marble it inscribed.

Charlotte Bronte -- Jane Eyre

Whatever can have induced that transcendent woman to marry that effigy and figure-head of a baronet is one of the most impenetrable mysteries that ever baffled human inquiry.

Charles Dickens -- Bleak House

See if you are not burnt in effigy this 5th of November coming.

George Eliot -- Middlemarch

If that you were the good Sir Rowland’s son,— As you have whisper’d faithfully you were, And as mine eye doth his effigies witness Most truly limn’d and living in your face,— Be truly welcome hither: I am the duke That lov’d your father.

William Shakespeare -- As You Like It

Denounced, threatened and burned in effigy in Missouri, he did not even bother to seek re-election to the Senate.

John F. Kennedy -- Profiles in Courage

She’s really here, in the flesh, lying motionless beside him in the suddenly too-quiet bed, arms at her sides like an effigy; but she is not Grace Marks.

Margaret Atwood -- Alias Grace

If he feels like it, he can put up a thousand "No Smoking" signs, hang the Marlboro man in effigy, whatever.

Steve Lopez -- The Soloist

There, small, faultless, and gleaming, lay a diminutive effigy of a woman’s leg on the dark velvet, an enchanting leg, with the knee a little bent and the foot pointing downwards to end in the daintiest of toes.

Hermann Hesse -- Steppenwolf

But as Gerty lay with arms drawn down her side, in the motionless narrowness of an effigy, she felt a stir of sobs from the breathing warmth beside her, and Lily flung out her hand, groped for her friend’s, and held it fast.

Edith Wharton -- The House of Mirth

The answer lay in the very question, and I stared at the mask as though I had unearthed an effigy of my own endangered soul.

Pat Conroy -- The Lords of Discipline

Mama, however, had large feet, and around the house she wore men’s shoes, usually without strings, and a dusting or mobcap like somebody’s fanciful cotton effigy of the form of the brain.

Saul Bellow -- The Adventures of Augie March

During pujos, scheduled for convenience on two Saturdays a year, Gogol and Sonia are dragged off to a high school or a Knights of Columbus hall overtaken by Bengalis, where they are required to throw marigold petals at a cardboard effigy of a goddess and eat bland vegetarian food.

Jhumpa Lahiri -- The Namesake

VIII Rain, Darkness, and Anxious Wanderers While the effigy of Eustacia was melting to nothing, and the fair woman herself was standing on Rainbarrow, her soul in an abyss of desolation seldom plumbed by one so young, Yeobright sat lonely at Blooms-End.

Thomas Hardy -- The Return of the Native

That minute’s exchanged look in a kitchen garden, that hand upon my head in his daughter’s bedroom; a ukase, a decree, a serene and florid boast like a sentence (ay, and delivered in the same attitude) not to be spoken and heard but to be read carved in the bland stone which pediments a forgotten and nameless effigy.

William Faulkner -- Absalom, Absalom!

…with him for his own soul; Giambattista Cibo, who in mockery took the name of Innocent, and into whose torpid veins the blood of three lads was infused by a Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta, the lover of Isotta, and the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was burned at Rome as the enemy of God and man, who strangled Polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison to Ginevra d’Este in a cup of emerald, and in honour of a shameful passion built a pagan church for Christian worship; Charles VI.

Oscar Wilde -- The Picture of Dorian Gray

All of this danced up and down, like a company of gnats, each separate but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic net—danced up and down in Lily’s mind, in and about the branches of the pear tree, where still hung in effigy the scrubbed kitchen table, symbol of her profound respect for Mr. Ramsay’s mind, until her thought which had spun quicker and quicker exploded of its own intensity; she felt released; a shot went off close at hand, and there came, flying from its…

Virginia Woolf -- To the Lighthouse

…elevate his style; and it was at such points as these, too, that he would begin to speak of the "vain dream of life," of the "inexhaustible torrent of fair forms," of the "sterile, splendid torture of understanding and loving," of the "moving effigies which ennoble for all time the charming and venerable fronts of our cathedrals"; that he would express a whole system of philosophy, new to me, by the use of marvellous imagery, to the inspiration of which I would naturally have ascribed…

Marcel Proust -- Swann’s Way

…and perseverance that, although he brought no greater amount of previous knowledge to the subject than certain dim recollections of two or three very long sums entered into a ciphering-book at school, and relieved for parental inspection by the effigy of a fat swan tastefully flourished by the writing-master’s own hand, he found himself, at the end of a fortnight, in a condition to report his proficiency to Mr Linkinwater, and to claim his promise that he, Nicholas Nickleby, should now…

Charles Dickens -- Nicholas Nickleby

He did not even take the trouble to cast a stone in passing, as was the usage, at the miserable statue of that Périnet Leclerc who had delivered up the Paris of Charles VI. to the English, a crime which his effigy, its face battered with stones and soiled with mud, expiated for three centuries at the corner of the Rue de la Harpe and the Rue de Buci, as in an eternal pillory.